The disclosure generally relates to providing digital content to a user of an online system, e.g., a digital magazine server, and more specifically to detecting patterns of user interactions with content provided by the digital magazine server and providing content on topics of interest to users based on the detected patterns.
Digital distribution channels disseminate a wide variety of digital content including text, images, audio, links, videos, and interactive media (e.g., games, collaborative content) to users. The increasingly popular computing devices, such as smart phones, tablet computers, and increased network bandwidth (for wired and wireless networks) have provided more communications platforms for users to search and consume digital content. However, users can be overwhelmed by the broad and unfiltered digital content available to users. Existing techniques for recommending digital content to users are based on previous interactions by users with an online system, such as a social networking system, without taking into account repeating patterns of user interaction with content such as topics of content and time when users engaged with the content. However, these conventional techniques often fail to present users with meaningful content on topics likely to be of interest to users at the specific time the content is requested. Additionally, while some existing online systems manually curate digital magazine cover pages with content of interest to a user, these manually curated cover pages often fail to accommodate the dynamically changing interests of the user and the diverging topics in the digital content items.